I don’t think Jesus came for us to worship him, but to follow him. We are to take up where he left off. We are to be Christ in this world. We are to be the fixing, the healing for the world. We are to bring unity and love and understanding. We are to build bridges and tear down walls between people. We are to encourage and to lift up. We are to be a force for good.

So many people get stuck on the idea of Jesus as the Son of God. That whole miracle-birth thing really gets in their way. Now – don’t get me wrong. I believe that Jesus is God incarnate. But I don’t think that you have to believe that. I think that part of the message of the loaves and fishes is that we are to be the bread that is distributed. There was an amazing magic trick that happened in those two stories of Jesus feeding the multitude. Jesus is the starter – he shows us how to do it. He takes what is there – a few simple meager loaves and fishes. These were gifts that were offered. He blesses them – he gives thanks to God for the gift of them. And then he breaks them. He takes what is there – and he breaks it. This seems counterintuitive. But it has to be broken for there to be more.

Most of us like to hang on to what we have. We see our things as ours – our health, our jobs, our families, our friends. We don’t see these things as gifts from God. And we certainly don’t like it when they are taken from us. We certainly don’t like the idea of voluntarily giving them up – of breaking them.
But when they are broken, when we are broken, we get a chance to become more than what we were. In that time we can choose to give thanks. We can choose to see that they were gifts to us in the first place. We can choose to become more than our things that we think bring us comfort. We can choose to be the bread.

We can choose to feed others. We can choose to volunteer at Second Harvest. We can choose to raise money for AIDS prevention. We can choose to stand up to bullies. We can choose to be kind to the stranger. We can choose to not gossip. We can choose, every moment, every day, to be more than we are. We can choose to let Jesus work His magic on us and make us more than we were. We can rise with him and feed the world with love.